Predictive analytics is proving itself both powerful and perilous. Powerful, because advanced algorithms can take a near-unlimited number of factors into account, provide deep insights into variation, and scale to meet the needs of even the largest company. Perilous, because bad data and hidden false assumptions can seriously mislead. Further, …

Access to credit is a key constraint for entrepreneurs. And limited credit is in part caused by the difficulty of predicting which small businesses will and won’t succeed. In the past, a community bank would have a relationship with the businesses on Main Street, and when it came time for …

From clean water supplies to the polio vaccine, the most effective public health interventions are typically preventative policies that help stop a crisis before it starts. But predicting the next public health crisis has historically been a challenge, and even interventions like chlorinating water or distributing a vaccine are in …

Most companies are unprepared for the emerging revolution in predictive energy analytics. In fact, many readers’ eyes will have already glazed over at the preceding sentence, with the natural initial reaction that energy-related data isn’t relevant to their jobs. But what happens when every single light fixture in all of …

CRM is typically all about customer behavior: you track customers’ behavior in terms of where, when and in what context they interacted with your company. But the increasing ease with which you can track behavior and the ability to build and maintain extensive behavioral databases has encouraged many marketers to …

In the near future, simply having predictive models that suggest what might be done won’t be enough to stay ahead of the competition. Instead, smart organizations are driving analytics to an even deeper level within business processes—to make real-time operational decisions, on a daily basis. These operational analytics are embedded, …

Any company’s decisions lie on a spectrum. On one end are the small, everyday decisions that add up to a lot of value over time. Amazon, Capital One, and others have already figured out how to automate many of these, like whether to recommend product B to a customer who …

The 2002 movie Minority Report told the story of a future in which law enforcement could tell who would commit crimes in the future.  The police then arrested those people before they could commit the crimes. A good deal of work in the social sciences tries to do the same thing, …

Imagine one of your managers walks into their subordinate’s office and says, “Our data analysis predicts that you will soon get restless and think of leaving us, so we want to make you an offer that our data shows has retained others like you.”  Would your employees welcome the offer, …

A complicated system is somewhat like a complicated recipe. You know what the outcome will be because you understand what will cause what — combine a given number of ingredients together in a certain way, put them in the oven, and the results will be consistent as long as you repeat …